Grafos started as a side project with the main objective to develop tools and algorithms for large-scale graph mining and graph analytics. Grafos comes with two components:

The Okapi ML Library; the first library with algorithms built on top of Apache Giraph.

The Real-Time Giraph; a graph analytics engine that brings analysis of dynamic graphs – made easy.

I have already received some questions about Okapi and here’s what I said.

Why Okapi? Okapi is the missing piece from the puzzle of graph analytics. Graph processing systems vary. Models, paradigms and techniques diverge. However, graph processing algorithms are endangered species. Well, not for long 🙂 Okapi provides algorithms ready to be used and analyse large-scale graphs in the most efficient way.

Why Okapi instead of Mahout? Mahout is a well established ML library that follows the MapReduce paradigm. Okapi aims to be an ML and Graph Analytics library following Giraph. (Friendly reminder: MapReduce becomes suboptimal when it comes to iterative algorithms [yes really], while Giraph embraces iterations and nails it with large-scale graphs.)

What does Okapi provide? So far, Okapi addresses two areas of interest; Collaborative Filtering and Graph Analytics. Documentation is provided along with the growing codebase. Here’s a direct link to Okapi. More algorithms are yet to come – and you can be part of it!

Is Real-Time Giraph possible? The limit is one’s imagination. Luckily, researchers in Telefonica set the limit far away and dare to innovate. As Claudio aptly explains, this modified version of the Giraph runtime aims to run “real-time computations of graph algorithms for event-based workloads. Without changing your existing code for offline analysis.“. This component is yet to be published. Wait for it – or do not wait and become a tester by dropping a line!

The reactions and responses from institutions, researchers, and colleagues have been motivating. Okapi is open-source and anyone can download it or clone it. Give it a try! In the Okapi Mailing List you can post questions, find answers and provide any kind of feedback (yes negative as well).

We celebrate the launch of Grafos with the 1st Okapi Hackathon! The Hackathon starts on Wednesday, March 26th and ends on Thursday evening, March 27th. Location: at Telefonica in the amazing city of Barcelona. I wish I could be there these two days. We hope and believe that this Hackathon will be a great opportunity for brainstorming, growing the Okapi codebase, improving and welcoming new friends and collaborators.

We are super happy to welcome our first users and we are looking forward to growing the Okapi family!

I wanted to make a fresh start with the new year. I wrote down my do and don’t lists, my wishes, my goals. I investigated why I couldn’t achieve some of them last year. I tried to find the source of all evil – well sort of. 🙂

I realized there are two vital characteristics one should have to achieve goals; these are passion and self discipline. Passion couples with love. If you love what you are doing, you become passionate. You get enthusiastic, engaged, you feel alive. Passion is simple; you either have it or not.

Self discipline is tricky. You may love what your doing, you can be very passionate and at the same time you can have 10+ other interests, activities, thoughts to spend your time on. You prioritize, but you are still left with less time than needed. Why? You didn’t pay attention; to time passing, to procrastination, to distractions. I find self discipline crucial for this year’s goals.

My brain is designed to remember some stuff. The rest of the stuff – which is the majority – exist on my laptop. Now imagine losing my laptop –> End of the world (first world problem I guess).

Two days ago, I couldn’t enter my ubuntu. This is a translation of ‘losing my laptop’. After passing from grub it hanged on a black screen. Nightmare. Kernel version: 3.2.0-56. So I started choosing older kernel versions till I reached 3.2.0-51 in which I could enter unity with a terrible resolution. Still I had a visual access. Relief. Continue reading →

The truth is, I would never expect such a day. Yesterday I was the most optimistic person on earth – I am most of the times. My last night post closed with the full-of-hope sentence:

Let’s see what my instinct has to say in the morning.

Well, my instinct was quite talkative today. Like the instinct of every other person in our team. And guess what; each instinct covered a different frequency layer of this huge universe. Yes, we are different. Each team member has his/her own ideology, priorities and keys. And reaching a consensus was not trivial at all. Mostly because the idea seemed simple at the beginning and ended up being quite complicate considering logistics, financial issues, third-party dependencies, and the list goes on.

The first shock came when I realized that everybody were talking in German – or maybe Swiss German, both sound strange to my ears anyway.

I ignored this fact since Andreas Panteli and I were attending the event with a specific idea in mind to pitch and build the next 2 days. Out of 20 pitches, the 6 most famous ones (famous by means of being voted by other attendees) have been chosen to become business plans. Our idea didn’t ‘pass’. However, we found MIke Pfaff‘s idea quite super interesting with high potential to become something great. And we joined. 🙂